The guy who opened the door was a fright in plaid shorts. Beard unkempt, belly untamed, T-shirt bearing some inscrutable graphic, a metal band logo in knotted swamp tree roots. “Hey,” he said. “You Danielle?”

“Yes,” I nodded cautiously, “that’s me.”

“I’m Markus, with a K. Come in, the studio’s in the basement.”

The studio wasn’t much of a studio, and it wasn’t much of a basement either. Markus started fiddling with guitars and amps, cranking out chords and riffs. There was another guy, lankier, lounging on a folding chair, laptop perched precariously on his knees. He looked up and said, “Hey, I’m Theo. You the singer?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I’m here for.”

“Cool beans,” he said. “How much did Markus tell you ’bout the project?”

“Not too much. You wanted a female pop-R&B-soul kind of voice, and I wanted to make five hundred dollars in an hour.”

“That’s right,” said Theo. “So here’s our business model. Adele’s dropping her new album on Friday. She just dropped the tracklist.” He showed me a screenshot of the list on his phone, but he yanked it away before I finished looking at it. “Now we’ve got a lot to record.”

“What do you mean?”

“Markus and me, we get these tracklists and the cover art and we just spend a session banging out songs. They’ve gotta have the same titles and track lengths, you know? Then we upload to Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, a couple hours before the actual album drops, and we usually get a couple hundo in streaming royalties before someone official forces us to pull it down. But Adele, you know, she’s huge. Easily a couple grand for us if we time it right.”

A final discordant chord rang out from an amp on Markus’s side of the basement. “I’m ready,” he called out.

“So let me get this straight,” I ventured. “You’re releasing fake versions of upcoming albums by big-name artists to trick people into streaming you instead?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“And you want me to be a fake Adele.”

“Yeah.” He twiddled a bit with a lock of his hair. “Our last girl singer Sheila, she left after the Doja Cat incident, and we got along fine by ourselves, but with Adele, you know…”

“Right.”

“Yeah. Listen, if you don’t think this project’s right for you, by all means walk on out. But there’s nothing illegal we’re doing here, technically, and it’s all in good fun, and we each get a couple hundo at least. Think about it.”

I thought about it. On one hand, this was incredibly bizarre and wrong on several different levels. On the other hand, I needed to pay rent.

“Okay guys, I can do it. But I will ask that you don’t credit me or include my name in any of your materials. Just give me my five hundred dollars and that’s it.”

Theo glanced at Markus, who glanced back at him. Then he turned back to me. “Deal,” he finally said.

“So, how am I supposed to do this, know what to sing? The album’s not out yet. Unless you have any leaks?”

“Leaks?” chuckled Markus. “Hell naw, we ain’t got time for that. We make shit up!” He strummed a few distorted chords on his guitar.

“Yeah,” said Theo, “so take this first track. Its title is ‘Strangers by Nature’, so just be something like, strangers by nature, strangers by nature, yeah, we’re strangers by nature, uh huh, ooooh yeah!”

I stared at them. “That’s what I have to do?”

“Yeah, just make shit up! For 3 minutes and 2 seconds. And really, only the first 30 seconds have to be believable, because that’s how Spotify counts one listen. Alright guys, we’re recording now.”

Markus began thrashing around on his guitar.

I stepped up to the microphone.